“What’s the big deal, Logan?” She was becoming frustrated. “I just asked you your son’s name, not the secret formula for cold fusion. Have you neglected to tell me that you’re married too?”
He frowned. “No, I’m not married. Just incredibly stupid. This chick I was dating back when I was nineteen told me she was on the pill. What a damn lie.”
Sophie was beginning to understand his difficulty with trust. “So, what did you do with your son on Labor Day?”
“You know, just hung out. Went to a barbecue. At my Uncle Ange’s.”
“That sounds nice.”
He grunted in response.
Sophie bit her lip. “What kind of parent are you, Logan?”
“Dunno. Don’t get to see my kid much. He’s usually with his mom. I know I’m better than my parents at least.”
“Oh? You think you had bad parents?”
He exhaled with disgust. “Do you think I’d be here if the answer to that question was no?”
“Probably not,” she conceded. “How do you try to treat your son differently from the way your parents treated you?”
His jaw muscles flexed as he worked furiously on the gum, and he avoided her gaze. Apparently he was clamming up once again. Sophie sighed and re-crossed her legs, pulling self-consciously on her short skirt. The black skirt had seemed long enough when she put it on that morning, but the material kept riding up when she was seated.
They again sat in discomfited silence. Eventually Sophie offered, “Lots of people disagree with how they were raised. I hated how my parents fought all the time when I grew up. My mother is overbearing, and my father can be a complete jerk.”
He took the bait. “No father is more of a jerk than mine.”
Sophie tried to stay quiet, silently willing him to continue speaking.
After a beat, his deep voice added, “He’s a prick of the highest order.”
When he was not more forthcoming, Sophie prodded, “You want to be a better father to your son, then?”
His face clouded over with an unreadable emotion. “I know this much: I’m never going to rule by fear, like that prick did.”
It was a curious phrase. Ruled what? “Your father ‘ruled by fear’?”
Sophie tilted her head to one side, watching the alpha male across from her change his body posture right before her eyes. He seemed to shrink, his commanding presence shifting into a more submissive stance, the deep blue of his eyes growing stormy, a glint of fear floating in their deep-blue pools.
Suspecting she knew what was happening, Sophie took some calming breaths. She had worked with many trauma survivors at the VA hospital during her internship—men who had endured gruesome, life-threatening experiences while serving their country. When they began to tell their combat stories, some of them had displayed the same body language as Logan now did. Her voice was soft and gentle as she questioned, “Your father hurt you?”
The troubled eyes bore into her, stealing her breath away with their vulnerability.
“He tried to hurt me,” Logan responded with feigned bravado, enraged by the tremor in his voice. “But I didn’t let him.”
She swallowed slowly, attempting to figure out a nonthreatening way to question him. “How old were you?”
“I was a kid, like nine or ten. He came home all pissed off about something. The littlest thing could set him off. Who knows what the hell had happened.” Logan gave an involuntary shudder, then started muttering, “Fuck.”
“It’s okay, Logan. You can tell me.”
“Why?” he challenged angrily. “Why talk about this shit?”
“Because talking about the past makes it have less of a hold over you.”
She thought he had closed himself off again, and was surprised when he said quietly, “He started hitting my mother … slapping and punching her.”
Sophie closed her eyes. “Did he do that a lot?”
“Yeah. Like I said, he was a fucking asshole.” He breathed out disgustedly. “The kicker of it was that I hated my mother more than him. Hated her for being too weak to stand up to him, hated her for …”
“For failing to protect you?” Sophie asked.
Logan’s eyes narrowed. “Well, I sure didn’t protect her. I got my brother the hell out of there and we went and hid like total chickenshits.”
“You were nine! Of course you hid.”
She watched him tremble as he stared off into space, numbly reporting, “But my dad found us anyway. He, uh, he … he dragged us down the hallway … and he threw us in the closet. For all we knew our mom was lying dead in the family room. It didn’t sound good.”
He took a ragged breath, and Sophie kept quiet. “That’s when he came at us with his belt. He was just whaling on us in the closet, and it stung like a bitch … it was so dark, and my brother was crying … and when I tried to cover my brother so he wouldn’t get hit, my dad started screaming at me.”
Logan clenched both fists and continued. “He yanked me off and threw me into my room. He kept coming after me with the belt until finally he got tired or something, and then he left me alone.”
Logan held his head in his hands and rocked back and forth on the sofa.
“Your brother?” Sophie asked tremulously. “How old was he?”
“Four.”
“Where was he that whole time?”
Logan stopped rocking and sat completely still, frozen in the past. She watched his body start to shake while he kept his head down.
“Logan?” she questioned gently. Then she noticed a tear fall to the floor, followed by another and another. Sophie almost gasped. It was so bizarre to see this pillar of strength break down into sobs. He tried valiantly to hide his crying. Not knowing what to do, she stood up, hesitated, fidgeted with her hands worriedly, then finally crossed the room and sat next to him on the sofa.
“It’s okay,” she encouraged, wringing her hands in her lap.
“Fuck,” he said in a strained, tear-filled voice. He radiated intensity in the small office.
“Where was your brother?”
Logan cried quietly, his head bowed. When he finally spoke, his voice was hitched and raspy. “He was in that closet the whole damn night. My dad wouldn’t let my mom get him out. He was in the dark, all alone, scared shitless. He was only four!”
Logan’s fists clenched tightly once again. “The next morning my dad finally hauled him out of there. When he found out that my brother, uh, that h-he had peed in his pants … he started … he … fuck! Uh, he started beating the shit out of him.”